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By Susan HeaveyREUTERS • Sunday March 3, 2013 11:08 AM

WASHINGTON — Wide racial and gender gaps persist among young Americans when it comes to earning
a college degree and getting a job, according to fresh data from a 14-year government survey
released on Friday.

The study of about 9,000 25-year-olds found that 30 percent of such young women in the United
States had earned a bachelor’s degree compared with 22 percent of men.

Those women who had at least a bachelor’s degree were more likely to be employed than similarly
educated men and spend less time out of work, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

“In general, from ages 22 to 25, individuals with more education held more jobs, worked more
weeks and were less likely to be out of the labor force,” the statistics agency said.

Sociology professor Thomas DiPrete, co-director of Columbia University’s Center for the Study of
Wealth and Inequality, said the data highlight a gender gap when it comes to college education,
with men slipping behind.

While the study, which began in 1997, did not track wages, “the pattern is quite obvious that
the higher-educated are doing much better,” said DiPrete, who analyzed other data from the bureau’s
survey in his forthcoming book,
The Rise of Women.

The bureau also found large schooling differences by race.

At age 25, blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to be high-school dropouts, while
whites were more than twice as likely to have earned a bachelor’s degree, the survey showed.

While 30 percent of whites had graduated from college by their mid-20s, only 14 percent of
blacks and 12 percent of Hispanics had done so, it found.

That gap translated to a wide disparity for employment, especially among those with the least
education, the agency said. White high school dropouts were still more likely to spend more weeks
employed than racial minorities, it found.

For example, white dropouts spent 28 percent of their weeks between the ages of 22 and 25 out of
work compared with black dropouts, who were unemployed for 42 percent of that time, the bureau
said.